If Labour hasn’t yet chosen its election theme music it could do worse than to ask Mick Hucknall for the rights to Money’s Too Tight to Mention. The voters might appreciate the brutal honesty and, thankfully, the song ought to be available on the cheap. After all, it’s not just the Treasury and millions of ordinary families that are strapped for cash. The Labour party is broke too. For the first time since the disastrous 1983 campaign it can expect to be massively outspent by the Conservatives in the forthcoming general election.
The long campaign has already demonstrated Labour’s handicap. Since the turn of the year the Tories have spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on billboard and other advertising. Labour has no resources to compete until it is able to start dipping into the ringfenced election fund that can’t be touched until Gordon Brown goes to the Palace. Even then the party will be at a huge financial disadvantage. Donors, like newspaper proprietors, like to back a winner and Brown hasn’t looked like a winner since the election that never was in 2007, a non-contest that itself added over £1m to the overdraft.
Conventional campaigning wisdom suggests this should put Labour at a huge and obvious disadvantage. With a hostile press, paid advertising can easily appear like the best way of getting your message across and evening up the odds. And there is no doubt that an effective ad can capture the public’s imagination. The last time a Labour government went into an election it expected to lose, in 1979, it had nothing to compete with the brilliant Saatchi & Saatchi-designed Labour Isn’t Working poster. And when John Major started with a significant poll deficit in the runup to the 1992 contest much of the credit for his subsequent victory was given to the equally hardhitting Labour’s Double Whammy campaign.
Yet the coming election won’t be a conventional contest and the old rules, which were only ever based on informed guesses about how much influence paid advertising could have on the voters, may not apply. The sorely damaged reputation of politics that was compounded by last year’s expenses scandal means people are likely to take what all parties say with unprecedentedly huge quantities of salt this time around. Political communications in all its forms is now subject to a far greater degree of cynicism. It has hit Labour hardest but not exclusively. So even if it could afford them, the party would probably be wasting its money putting up posters nobody would believe.
The main purpose of expensive advertising is to shift the focus of the campaign on to your favoured issues. Labour Isn’t Working and, even more so, Labour’s Double Whammy were effective because they were agenda-setting. In 1992 Neil Kinnock wanted to talk about the NHS but found himself forced on to the defensive over tax and spending. In 2010 neither main party will have much opportunity to change the agenda. The ground on which the election will be fought has already been fixed by the country’s straitened economic circumstances. How the leaders address the central issues in the televised debates and elsewhere will have far more of an impact on the result than anything dreamed up in the comfort of the ad agencies.
Without the luxury of a huge publicity budget, Brown will have no choice but to focus on his core political message. It is a discipline that will be only to the benefit of Labour’s campaign.
The election will be all about squeezing maximum value from scarce resources. If Brown can do it with his party’s parlous finances, he might yet convince the voters he’s the best man to do it with the country’s too.
Lance Price is a former Labour party director of communications and press adviser to Tony Blair. His latest book, Where Power Lies, is published by Simon & Schuster on 4 February. www.lanceprice.co.uk